4th Annual International Young Researchers Conference
The Problems of the Postcommunist State
November 4-6, 2004
November 4, 2004
Keynote Lecture: Putin as a State Builder
John Dunlop Senior Fellow, Hoover Institute, Stanford University
Irvin Hall, Room 40, 5:00pm
Conference Schedule now available!
The Havighurst Center for Russian and Post-Soviet Studies at Miami University will host the 2004 Annual International Young Researchers Conference in November. This conference is intended to give young scholars an opportunity to present their views with the hope that a sustained dialogue on the wide range of issues related to the postcommunist state might reveal what we have learned so far, and stimulate the emergence of more coherent intellectual agendas and ideas guiding future research.
Largely neglected during the first decade of postcommunist studies, the problem of "the state" now figures quite prominently both in academic discoursed in the West and in political discourses in the former Soviet block. At the same time, it would be premature to assert that the heightened interest in various aspects the state building, state society relations and the transformation of infrastructures of governance has resulted in the emergence of coherent research programs and/or a relative consensus regarding the conceptual, theoretical and methodological issues surrounding state related phenomena.
For some, the problem is primarily one of prescribing policies: what role should the state play in the large scale processes of transformation still underway in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union? For others, analytical issues are much more important: how should we characterize analytically the dynamic ways in which "the state" has changed after 1989, and what factors shaped the course of these changes? Still others emphasize comparative issues: why is it that various states have followed different trajectories of development, and what is the best way to think conceptually about these patterns of divergence? Finally, anthropologists are becoming increasingly interested in the very meaning of notions like "the state" or "interacting with the state" in everyday life, with a special emphasis on how of gender, ethnicity and socio economic status may structure such perceptions and experiences.
Submitted paper topics from a wide range of disciplines (i.e., anthropology, international studies, sociology, economics, history, political science, etc):
Robert Argenbright (Miami University), Moscow’s Relic
Spaces: Where Redevelopment Bogs Down
Andrew Bickford (UC-Berkeley), Life in the Veterans’ Group:
East German Army Officers, The Military, & Citizenship in the New German
State
Elena Bogdonova (European University, St. Petersburg), Citizen-and-power Interaction: Transforming Scenario: On the Material of the Citizens’ Complaints
Jennifer Cash (IU-Bloomington), The Social Role of Art & Artists in
Post-Soviet Moldova: Cultural Policy, Institutional Reform, & Europeanization
George Georgiadis (Cambridge University), External Determinants
of Domestic Institutional Change: The Impact of EU Policies on the Patterns
of Post-Communist Economic Transformation
Vlad Mykhnenko (Cambridge University), The Post-Communist Capitalism & the
State in Transition: An Uneasy Relationship?
Douglas Rogers (Miami University), From State Farm to State Administration?
The Fate of Municipalization Reforms in the Rural Perm Region
Natalia Roudakova (Stanford University), “Independent” Mass
Media & the State in Russia in the 1990s
Gulnaz Sharafutdinova (Miami University), The Oligarchs Are Coming! Capital Expansion & Center Periphery Battles in Post-Communist Russia
John Scherpereel (University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee), Sub-national Actors, European Integration, & State Reconfiguration in Postcommunist Europe
Jennifer Suchland (UT-Austin), Citizenship, Sexual Difference & the Postcommunist Russian State
This will be an intensive two-day working conference during which each of the selected papers will be critiqued by the other participants and a team of discussants. We plan to publish the final versions of papers in an edited volume.